Fixin' t'ings around de house

[unixronin]

My parents are visiting (One lantern hung in the Old North Church!), and my dad has been helping me get a bunch of jobs done.  It has been a busy week and a half or so, but we're making good progress.

First of all, we got the laundry room replumbed.  The water pipes no longer pass under the laundry room floor, directly above the uninsulated slab, which led to them freezing in winter.  They now come up from the crawlspace (warmed by waste heat from the heating furnaces), up the end wall of the larger of the two laundry room closets, along the edge of the ceiling, and down to a valve manifold just behind the washing machine, where there is a combined washing machine valve and two separate hose faucets.  There is now no point anywhere in that pipe run in which the pipes are in unheated space.  At Cymru's request, the pipes aren't coved in at all, they're just left as exposed, brightly polished copper.  (I need to wipe a coat of clear polyurethane onto them, very soon, to keep them that way.)

While we were at it, we turned the washing machine 90 degrees, and put a heavy industrial rubber mat under it which damps vibration and stops it from walking across the floor during the spin cycle if the load is unbalanced.  Then we emptied out the smaller of the two closets, moved the 220V dryer outlet into it, put a new dryer vent through the closet wall (a job which required a wet diamond core drill to drill the required four-inch hole through the cement stucco on the outside of the house), and backed the dryer into it after turning it through ninety degrees as well.  This has effectively about doubled the usable space in the laundry room, and made the shelves in that closet useful.  (Previously we couldn't really use that closet at all except to use it to store boxes that we didn't need to be able to get to easily, because the dryer blocked the closet doors anyway.)  The washer and dryer now face each other about four feet apart, making it nice and easy to transfer laundry between them.  I'm planning to take the rather nice bifold doors from the former closet and install them on Cymru's closet upstairs, at her request, in place of the sliding doors that are there now.  (Those double sliding closet doors have always seemed like a silly idea to me. They guarantee you can never get to more than half the closet at one time.  Their one advantage, as far as I can see, is that they allow the builder to be sloppy about the width of the closet door opening.)

Next up, we rebuilt the Silly Goose's loft bed, after finally securing a sufficient supply of barrel nuts (in which Lowes was no help at all; they didn't come through on their assurances that they'd get more in) and a doweling jig.  The jig, unfortunately, turned out to be made to such loose tolerances that it became part of the problem, not part of the solution.  It unfortunately took us until after we had completed the second of the four corner posts to realize that this was why we were having so much trouble.  For the third and fourth posts, we set the jig aside and drilled by hand, with FAR superior results.  Goose's bed no longer has any transverse stiffness issues.

Today was a day for mostly small stuff.  I replaced the worn-to-near-uselessness outlet that the upstairs refrigerator is plugged into, after which we properly sealed off the end of the copper icemaker line we found behind the fridge (it had been the victim of a very badly bodged attempt to seal it off that left it seeping slowly), partly rebuilt the gate that we earlier dismounted from the lower deck (where it was doing nothing useful and progressively pulling its hinge-side post over) and made a start on installing it in its new home on the upper deck.  We got a better look at the badly worn support cable fitting on the left side of the garage door, though honestly we still don't really have a plan for how to deal with it (can't find the required parts), and then we tore down all the mismatched bodged-together shelves on the inside garage wall that needs to be opened up to check for insulation as a part of the job of remodeling the front hallway.  We're waiting to finalize a bid from a contractor on that job, which is going to cost about twice what we were previously expecting.  The plan is to take out the front door, tear up the hallway floor, tear out and replace all the rotted wood and subflooring, install new subfloor, and move the front door out to the outside wall of the house, so what was a recessed front porch now becomes a mini-mudroom.  This is actually simpler and easier than trying to properly water-seal that porch after the fact.

Why, yes, since you mention it, there IS an astounding amount of really poor workmanship around this house.  We're fixing it, little by little.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

for extra special value, you could remove the garage entirely, and "finish it", (workshop? more living space), and use the lower grounds for the detached garage ;) i dunno, just thinking out loud.

#

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's actually on the indefinite-future project list — finish the garage, turn it into a playroom, and construct a new two-car garage in the small clearing west of the house, preferably with an enclosed companionway between it and the house. Ideally, it should be constructed on a raised foundation to put the garage floor close to, at, or even slightly above road level, so that we have an approximately-level driveway instead of the current steeply sloping one. (Preferably one on which rain and meltwater drain away from, instead of towards, the garage.) If we do that, the current driveway will have to be torn up, or they'll tax us for two entrances; but as it is, it really needs to be completely torn up and relaid anyway.

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

Tax for 2 entrances? Huh?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

We are informed that if you have two "entrances to the property" — i.e, two separate driveways or a loop driveway — that's considered to be a feature that raises the desirability of your property, and you pay a property tax surcharge for it, as you do for having a desirable view.

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

That is beyond lame. Tax mongers...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Personally I consider it an acceptable price for having no state sales tax or income tax. Particularly since most of the property-tax-increasing provisions are things that primarily affect McMansions that are largely owned as vacation homes by people whose primary residence is in another state.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

one thing at a time... sounds like you have a handful. hopefully you've had your allotment of unpleasant surprises on this front...

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

That seems like an awful lot of stuff done. I need to have a list of projects for when my father visits, he is not happy unless he is working on something.

There is a good reason that houses are called money pits. Poor workmanship often is the label applied when there is insufficient money to fix the thing properly. There are several things I would like to do differently in the house, but I am often constrained to parts on hand to do the job, or make the fix. Sometimes I am constrained by time. There are several things on my to-do list for the house. Then there is what my wife wants done. (Decisions, decisions...)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There's "fixing something cheaply", and there's just plain bodging it. Too many things we've found in this house have been Just Plain Bodged. Entire electrical circuits wired backwards (hot and neutral reversed). Plumbing valves installed upside down, so that the drain vent is on the supply side (and thus useless) instead of the controlled side of the valve. And then there's the "no moisture barrier WHATSOEVER between the front porch and the floor joists". This isn't just a question of low-budget maintenance, much of it is things that were shoddily built in the first place.